Shashi Tharoor: Nehru: A BiographyAs a young Indian child growing up in America, I heard stories about India's independence movement from my parents. I was told about Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. I had trouble believing that a single individual could have so much impact on the world. After reading, Shashi Tharoor's book, I've changed my mind.
Tharoor's analysis of the intertwining between an individual's biography and the birth of a nation is masterful. The book stays close to its subject, Nehru, but then ventures to link his biography to many of the Indian institutions we now take for granted, including: secularism, democracy, non-alignment, and the country's prowess in science and math. This is a highly readable book and I strongly recommend it to any reader interested in learning about India, its culture, and its first leader.

Mary Douglas: How Institutions ThinkThis book will re-wire your mind. If you ever believed that what we take for reality is mostly a projected societal consensus rather than objective fact, read this book. In addition to being a first-class theorist who can identify critical mechanisms for the social construction of reality, she is fantastic writer. I couldn't sleep for days after reading this book.

March 31, 2006

The great Irish novelist John McGahern has passed away. His stark and spare writing style often led to comparisons with Joyce, but personally I other than the Irish setting, I always found McGahern's writing more compelling and transcendent. The New York Times writes:

His style was terse. His novels moved deliberately through
their agonies of love and misgiving, always with reference to the
dominating Catholic culture and the rigors of wresting existence from
the fields and the peat bogs.

There were no truly happy endings
in his fiction. To the questions he posed about the meaning of life, he
gave equivocal answers. Some characters stayed in the country and
adjusted; others left. Most were nagged by doubt and guilt, caught
between the lure of personal fulfillment in the outside world and the
pull of family and home.

(Researcher Rana El Kaliouby's) program is based on a
machine-learning algorithm that she trained by showing it more than 100
8-second video clips of actors expressing particular emotions. The
software picks out movements of the eyebrows, lips and nose, and tracks
head movements such as tilting, nodding and shaking, which it then
associates with the emotion the actor was showing. When presented with
fresh video clips, the software gets people's emotions right 90 per
cent of the time when the clips are of actors, and 64 per cent of the
time on footage of ordinary people...

Getting the software to work is only the first step, (researcher
Rosalind) Picard warns. In its existing form it makes heavy demands on
computing power, so it may need to be pared down to work on a standard
hand-held computer...

March 21, 2006

In last Sunday's New York Times there was a recipe for homemade birthday cake accompanied by a refreshing call to de-industrialize childhood. The author wrote:

home-baked cakes strike a blow against the modern industrialization
of children's birthday parties, in which 20 6-year-olds are dragooned
to a gym, led around tumbling mats by grim-faced instructors for $45 a
head, then sent home with goody bags filled with embarrassingly
expensive electronic doodads.

Homemade cakes say, "It is
perfectly fine to stuff into my smallish home, play pin the tail on the
donkey and leave with a loot bag holding edible bracelets and a plastic
puzzle that will break in a week."

Take back childhood, people!

Since becoming a parent, one of the more curious sociological changes that I've seen when comparing my own upbringing to my children's upringing is the standardization and rationalization of childhood. Children are increasingly subject to powerful rational and technical forces--mostly through parents--that segments their lives into a series of continual interractions with formal organizations. This includes a number of activities-- from the organized soccer of Newton Girls Soccer to the formal organization of playdates to the institutionalization of standardized testing that now begins in elementary school. Parents are increasingly subject to a littany of "best practices" that emerges from magazines and so-called child experts. Terms like information, skills, complexity--which were often associated with rational production systems--are increasingly used to describe the interactions between parents and children in parenting books. One unintended consequence of this rationalization process, I fear, is the disenchantment of childhood.